Empiricism, Memory, and Knowledge In pre-Socratic times there was a school of thought known as “memorism” (or so I once dreamt). The principal doctrine of this school was that all knowledge is stored in memory: whenever you know something there was a past event that laid it down in memory, and knowledge is the recall […]
Affective Empiricism The classic debate between empiricism and rationalism concerning the origins of the human mind focused on the cognitive aspects of the mind.[1] Descartes and Leibniz believed that some knowledge is innate, while Locke thought that all knowledge is acquired through the senses. But there is little to nothing on the affective aspects of […]
On Substitutivity The idea of substituting one expression for another has played a key role in logical and semantic studies. In particular, the idea of substituting terms with the same reference has featured prominently: can this always be done without changing the truth-value of the sentence in which the terms occur? Is such substitution ever […]
Annoying Morality Given its importance, there is something deeply unsatisfactory about morality. I don’t mean its alleged subjectivity or relativity, which is more puerile than profound, still less the existence of metaethical controversy; I mean its fragmentary and unsystematic character. It appears as a list of injunctions with no unifying principle underlying them. This is […]
“Inner” and “Outer” It is with some reluctance that I undertake a discussion of an obscure and elusive topic: what philosophers mean by “inner” and “outer”, if anything. There is a cluster of putative distinctions surrounding the mental: internal and external, private and public, subjective and objective, mental and physical, spiritual and corporeal, inner and […]
Is Language in the Head? It has been said that meaning is not in the head, but is language in the head? A naïve response to this odd question might be: “Well, no, because language is speech and speech is in the mouth and throat”. Technically, the mouth is in the head, of course, but […]
I hereby perform the following performative: :”I hereby name this blog “The Journal of Philosophical Philosophy”. There, done. I am the editor and sole contributor (aside from such comments as I deem worthy of inclusion). That wasn’t so difficult.
Existence and Non-Existence We have puzzled over the nature of existence and the nature of non-existence, but we don’t ask how these two categories relate to each other. Does one entail the other? Not in the sense that if something exists then it doesn’t exist, and vice versa, but in the sense that if one […]
Metaphysical Meaning The positivists declared metaphysical sentences meaningless. This required them to be able to identify a metaphysical sentence. But how could they do that if such sentences literally have no meaning? It could not be by recognizing them as meaningless, though that is certainly an intelligible mental act, because many sentences are meaningless without […]
Metaphysical Cravings The soul craves metaphysics.[1] The thinking self wants to think about metaphysical questions. Why do they attract us so? I believe it is because we know (clearly and distinctly) that we are thinking beings: we are directly aware of ourselves as thinking beings. Not necessarily infallibly aware, but aware enough that we don’t […]